“The day after the election, I was in Trump Tower,” said Anthony Scaramucci. “I was in Trump’s office. We were celebrating, congratulating him on his victory. He says, ‘You’ve got to come help me. You’ve got to drop that stupid business of yours. I can give you a’—you know how he talks—‘I can give you an agency that’s 40 times the size of your business. Drop that stupid business of yours and come work for me.’ I said, ‘O.K. I’m happy to help.’”
Scaramucci, the Wall Street hedge-fund impresario and Donald Trump’s perfect foil, is irrepressible. Some six months after his historically short-lived tenure as the White House communications director, he has embarked on something of a rehabilitation tour. He has been defending Trump in Davos, on CNN, and in The Wall Street Journal when few others have, or would. The obvious subtext is that, in these difficult days, the president needs a friend—and the Mooch, as he is known, is the most loyal friend there is. Could Anthony Scaramucci actually talk his way back into the West Wing? In Trumpworld, stranger things have happened.
In a series of three epic interviews, Scaramucci, whom I’ve known for nearly a decade, told me his origin story, beginning as an Italian kid in Port Washington, on Long Island—his father spent 42 years digging up the sand that was used to build Manhattan skyscrapers. It was when his father cashed a $10,000 insurance policy to help put him through Tufts, where he played football, that Scaramucci had “my epiphany,” he told me. “I’m not gonna be this gold-chain-adorned guy driving around as a Long Island guido.”
Then, when he went to Harvard Law, his mother thought he was going to Hartford, Connecticut. “She’s got the map out,” he said. “I said, ‘No, ma, we’re going to Harvard.’” Then it was on to Goldman Sachs and, from there, the cutthroat world of hedge funds. That’s when his real education began, but it still didn‘t prepare him for what was to come. “I want you to imagine the worst person that you’ve met on Wall Street, the most ruthless and the most diabolical,” he told me. “That’s the best person in Washington. That’s the Eagle Scout of Washington.”
The West Wing was supposed to be the capstone to the Mooch’s unlikely rise. On January 12, 2017, Rick Dearborn, the executive director of the transition team, wrote that the Office of the President-Elect had offered him the job of assistant to the president and director of the Office of Public Liaison in the White House. It was pretty much the same job that Valerie Jarrett had in the Obama White House. It was a big deal, and he accepted the offer quickly. “I’m given the job of O.P.L. director, which is actually a perfect job for me,” he said. “I’m gonna be his public liaison of the corporations.”
To go into the White House, and in order to be free of any potential conflicts, he had to agree to sell his majority stake in SkyBridge Capital, his New York City-based hedge fund-of-funds. He hired Greg Fleming, a longtime financial institutions banker at Merrill Lynch and then a senior executive at both Merrill and Morgan Stanley, to run the auction process. Scaramucci eventually selected a consortium led by HNA Group Co. Ltd., a big Chinese conglomerate, and RON Transatlantic, as the buyers. There was another potential buyer that was offering a higher price, but that buyer also said it needed financing and intended to fire more than half of the SkyBridge employees. “I have 70 people on staff,” he said. “They were gonna let go 45 of them. So I’m like, ‘O.K. I’m not doing that to these people. I built this company with these people. I’m not blowing out 45.’
“So I said, ‘O.K., I’ll take the second-highest bid. This looks like they’re an unbelievable company.’ I meet all the people. I like them. They’re a global Fortune 500 company. Then we make the announcement on the deal, and then the hits start.
“Rancid Penis”—the Mooch’s name for Reince Priebus, then Trump’s chief of staff—“you know, he just cannot believe this. He’s just very jealous, can’t believe I’m this close to Trump. Priebus had the society broken up into ‘Always Trumpers’ and ‘Never Trumpers,’ and he was trying to flood the White House staff, as the chief of staff, with ‘Never Trumpers,’ and trying to figure out ways to blockade, slow down, and keep out, particularly of the White House, the ‘Trumper-Trumpers.’
“So, when the president turned to me and said he wanted to give me the O.P.L. job, I got a call from Reince: ‘Don’t take the O.P.L. job. You can be the finance director for the R.N.C. Stay at your company.’ Blah, blah, blah. I said, ‘No, no, no. I’m gonna take the O.P.L. job. I want to work with the president.’ How many times in my life am I gonna be able to work in the White House and work for the president of the United States? And Reince’s answer was, ‘Actually, I’m gonna do everything I can [to help you].’ He did say this because he’s a Washingtonian. That’s what they do to you, they say, ‘golly gee’ to your face and they act like Richie Cunningham to your face. They’re Richie Cunningham and they’re Opie from The Andy Griffith Show, but they’re the fucking Sith Lord behind your back. They’re hitting you with a lightsaber behind your back.” In fact, according to Scaramucci, Priebus disinvited Scaramucci’s parents from the January 22 swearing-in ceremony for the new White House staff.
Scaramucci believes that his decision to sell his stake in SkyBridge to HNA and RON gave Priebus an opening to try to get rid of him, or at least keep him from getting a job so close to Trump. “If I had sold to Blackstone, there would have been no opening there,” he continued. “Now he’s got his opening: ‘China, China, China.’ He goes to Trump. He says, ‘Oh my God. They’re selling to China. He probably got a high price from them. They think they’re gonna curry favor with you.’ He convinces Trump that I have a legal problem. I don’t.”
The Mooch continued: “He gets this whole nefarious research packet over to The New York Times. They love this stuff. Boom: HNA is this mysterious, nefarious company. Then he goes to [Steve] Bannon [then Trump’s chief strategist] and he says, ‘I’m gonna get you on the National Security Council if that’s where you want to go, but you’ve got to join forces with me and take out Scaramucci.’” (A source close to Bannon said it was “laughable” to think that he agreed to join forces with Priebus against Scaramucci to get on the N.S.C.) Scaramucci continued, “I helped Bannon through the three months that he was on the campaign, and we had a good relationship. But Bannon turns on me, because Bannon is ultimately railing against the swamp, but he’s actually a cock of the swamp. He’s the creature from the Black Lagoon, Bannon. He acts more swamp-like than any person that’s ever become a Washingtonian. So for all of his railing on the swamp, he is literally the pig in George Orwell’s Animal Farm that stands on his two legs the minute he gets power. He is the creature from the Black Lagoon.
“Now I realize that he’s turned on me and I go to see him,” he continued. “I said, ‘You’re out of your mind. Why have you turned on me?’ The O.P.L. [job] got put on ice because of ‘China, China, China and Reince, Reince, Reince.’ I pushed Priebus. I say, ‘Hey, we’re gonna be in trouble here now because you’re lying to the president about me.’ He says, ‘O.K. Don’t go to the press on that. I’m gonna give you one of these ambassadorships. You’ll be the ambassador to the O.E.C.D.’”
According to Scaramucci, Priebus kept that promise; he and Bannon recommended Scaramucci to be the United States ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, in Paris. The position came with a 17-room apartment in Paris. He was going to move there with his family. But the position, like any ambassadorship, required Senate approval, which would take a few months. In the meantime, according to Scaramucci, Priebus found the Mooch a desk job at the Export-Import Bank, in Washington. (The source close to Bannon said, “Bannon was the leading advocate for Anthony’s appointment to O.E.C.D. to get Senate confirmation, and later the possible opportunity to become a deputy Cabinet secretary or Cabinet secretary.”)
Trump, meanwhile, had been thinking seriously about pulling the plug on the Export-Import Bank, and one day summoned the Mooch to the Oval Office to talk about it. “He says, ‘O.K., you’re a smart guy. You were there for three weeks. Do I kill the bank or keep the bank?’” Scaramucci said. “I said, ‘You keep the bank.’ I gave him a one-page memo, explained to him why he should keep the bank. So Trump agreed with me, yeah. Jared [Kushner] said that Trump likes me because he realizes [that], like his father, I came from nowhere and had nothing. I was able to build myself up and hold my own in any situation. So he likes asking me my opinion because I usually have pretty good common-sense advice.”
By mid-July, the script changed again. And Mooch, who had originally supported Scott Walker, and then Jeb Bush, and suffered the resulting vicissitudes, seemed poised for a White House post. “Now, all of a sudden, I’m making a detour into the West Wing, because the president realizes that he’s got a huge problem on his hands,” Scaramucci said. “Go back [to July] and look at the news cycles. What was going on was absolute berserkazoid craziness: internecine warfare, leaks every 13 seconds, Bannon leaking on everybody, Priebus leaking on everybody, total chaos in the White House, total disorganization.”
Scaramucci’s cell phone rang. It was the White House. He was invited to come to the Oval Office to meet with Trump, with a stop first to see Ivanka. Scaramucci was not sure what this was all about. “And I don’t care,” he said. “Remember, I’m not intimidated by Trump. I have a relationship with him. I said that to him once in the Oval: ‘By the way, how do you want me to talk to you? Do you want me to talk to you like you’re the president of the United States, the way these other people talk to you, or do you want me to talk to you the way I was talking to you on the campaign, or when we were friends? Tell me which way you want to go here. Obviously, when they’re around I’ll say ‘Mr. President’ and all the sycophantic stuff, but when we’re alone, how do you want me to talk to you?’ [Replied Trump:] ‘You’ve got to talk to me like we’re friends.’”
The Mooch went to see Ivanka Trump in the White House, as requested. “So I go over that day,” he said. “I go see Ivanka. They clearly don’t want Priebus to know that I’m coming. I go through the door. There’s a study off the Oval Office. I’m sitting there with the president. Ivanka’s open with me. She says, ‘We have to re-structure.’”
There was a discussion of the president’s approval rating. “The president said, ‘What do you think is going on?’ I said, ‘Well, you’ve got to fix this situation with the media. Here are five or six things you can do immediately that would correct the situation, but the first thing you have to do is you’ve got a rocky situation here because you’ve got ‘Always Trumpers’ and R.N.C. people. Someone has to come in here and meld this culture together. And you got to stop the leaking. So you’ve got to get rid of these leakers.’
“So he says to me, ‘Well, will you come in and help me do that?’ I said, ‘Yeah. When? When do you want me to come in?’ He goes, ‘How about tomorrow? How about at 10 A.M. we’ll make you the comms director? You come in and help me fix this.’”
Scaramucci accepted Trump’s offer. “‘I’m gonna go out there and turn the lights back on and all the cameras and everything, and we’re gonna try to open it up a little bit,’” he told Trump. “I brought The New York Times in for an interview that week . . . The president knows that Bannon and Priebus are horrific leakers. He’s not a stupid guy.” He headed back to New York City for the night.
That’s when all hell started breaking loose in the White House. “That evening”—July 20—”I go from being told I’m gonna be the comms director to Priebus and Bannon trying to block me throughout the night,” he said. “Now they’re trying to kill me while I’m in the job. They’re hiring oppo people: have I sexually harassed any women in my office? Please, dear God, hopefully he has. Did he do anything nefarious on Wall Street?”
The Mooch made it through the night. He took a six A.M. flight from New York City to Washington, thinking he would be sworn in as the new White House director of communications four hours later. “I’m sitting at the Trump Hotel, where I am staying when I’m in Washington, I’ve got myself a cup of coffee, and my phone is ringing,” he said. “By the way, Reince Priebus had been calling me throughout the previous evening and texting me. I did not respond to him. He said, ‘Please call me. We’ve got to get on the same page on this. I’m the chief of staff, you’ve got to call me. I’m hearing things and I want to confirm whether or not they’re true.’ Blah, blah, blah. At the same time that he was doing that, he was also texting reporters that this is a publicity stunt by Anthony, that there’s no truth to this, there’s no veracity to this.” (Priebus did not respond to specific questions regarding this article.)
“I think he wasn’t sure,” Scaramucci continued. “I think he was trying to get to the bottom of it, and to persuade Trump not to do this, that this was a mistake. And so he figured that by the morning he would have Trump talked out of it, and he and Bannon were obviously working overtime to try and convince Trump not to do it.”
At the Trump Hotel, it was Stephen Bannon on the line. “Oh, it’s Steve Bannon! This is a guy I thought was a friend. This is a guy who I wrote a 10-point memo for when he joined the campaign. And I was working alongside of him throughout the time during the campaign, right? O.K., so now I’m in the Trump Hotel. The phone is ringing and Steve says, ‘How are you?’ ‘How am I? What do you mean how am I?’ He says, ‘Hey, you want to know something? You want to know what your chances are to become the comms director this morning here at the White House? You want to know what your chances are?’ I said, ‘What are my chances, Stephen?’ [Replied Bannon]: ‘Zero! You got that, man? Zero. You got it? Zero.’ I said, ‘Zero, O.K., I didn’t realize that the word ‘president’ was in front of your last name, Stephen, because if it was, if ‘president’ was in front of your last name, my chances would be less than zero.’ I said, ‘But the guy who has ‘president’ in front of his last name, I kind of have 100 percent. Now what do you want to do? Do you want to continue to fight with me, because we can fight all day and all night now that I’m in the White House with you? Or we can declare peace and work alongside each other to help the president with his agenda. What do you want to do?’”
Bannon tried to convince Scaramucci that he wasn’t up to the job. “He says to me, ‘You’re not equipped. This Russia thing, you won’t know how to handle it properly, you won’t know how to communicate it. Reince and I want to offer you a number of different jobs. Come and see us at 9:30 in the morning in the chief of staff’s office.’
“I tell Bannon, ‘O.K. I’m happy to go see you at 9:30.’ I go to the White House—I have my badge. I go upstairs and say hello to Ivanka. [She says,] ‘Are you ready?’ I say, ‘I’m totally ready, no problem.’ I go downstairs. I have a 30-minute meeting with Reince and Bannon. And Priebus is now, he’s pulling the Howdy Doody, Richie Cunningham delivery and ‘Oh golly gee shucks, we’re friends.’ I’m like, ‘Reince, we can spare the ceremony. I know that you dislike me. I now dislike you. You can spare the ceremony.’ I said, ‘I’m looking at the two of you jamokes. If my network took a shit it would be the combination of the two of you. I’m very, very frustrated with the two of you, I’m going to tell you right now.’”
At 10 A.M. on July 21, they headed into the Oval Office to see Trump. “He’s hot. Jared is in the office, Ivanka, me, Sarah [Huckabee Sanders], Hope [Hicks], and the two jamokes. The president is hot. He says, ‘Scaramucci is going to come in, he’s going to be the comms director.’ He’s dictating a press release to Sarah who is writing it all down, and then he turns to Priebus and he says, ‘I don’t want him reporting to you. He’s going to report directly to me. I don’t want him tainted with your stench. I know the two of you guys have been leaking on me and leaking on other people in the administration, and I want it to stop, and this guy’s in charge now. He’s going to fix the Comms Department; he’s going to fire the leakers.’ They are now super pissed. They walk out. I go the other way with Sarah, and then Sarah’s as white as a ghost. I’m getting the stern looks of anger and hatred from Sean Spicer. I’m like, ‘I don’t know why you’re looking at me like that for. If you want to work with me that’s great, and if you don’t that’s fine too.’ He goes into the president’s office and he resigns. He comes back and he announces that he’s resigned, and I said, ‘O.K., that’s great.’ Trump’s irritated. He says, ‘These guys are unbelievable. I gave them the job of a lifetime, they’re letting everybody down. They’re letting me down.’” (Spicer could not be reached for comment.)
The Mooch took a deep breath, and then reflected back on his days in the White House—11, according to his math, rather than 10, as many in the media had reported. “Now I told Colbert I thought I’d last longer than a carton of milk in your refrigerator,” he said. “But if you called me on July 22, that Saturday, and said, ‘Mooch, what’s happening here?’ I would have turned to you—and this is not revisionist history by the way, this is me literally saying it during that period of time—I would have said, ‘This is going to be very difficult because I’ve got the chief of staff and the chief strategist, they hate my guts. They’re now dumping on me in the press, they’re dumping anything that they can find. So I go back in to see the president. We agree that Sarah is going to be the press secretary. He then turns to Sarah and says, ‘Let Anthony do the press conference today. You O.K., you comfortable doing the press conference?’ I said, ‘Yeah, no problem, sir.’ [Trump says,] ‘O.K., what time is the press conference?’ [The Mooch replied,] ‘It’s at two o’clock.’ We were a little delayed.
“So now I walk back into the press secretary’s office,” he continued, “and the entire comm staff is there. I say, ‘Listen, there’s a lot of leaks going on. I don’t know who’s doing the leaking, but if you give me two or three weeks, I’ll be able to figure it out, and if you’re doing the leaking you’re going to get fired.’ They then turned to me and said, ‘O.K., great, do you want a briefing for the press room?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ They said, ‘Well you’re going to be in front of 250 members of the press and do you want a briefing on Iraq and a briefing on Afghanistan and a briefing on Korea, and a briefing on this and a briefing on that?’ I looked at all of them and I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ They looked at me very puzzled and I said, ‘Listen, I don’t want a briefing, all that’ll do is confuse me. Let me go up there and let me talk to these people the way I’m capable of and we’ll see what happens. Thank you, guys, class dismissed. Let’s go.’
“So I give the press conference and millions of people see it and it’s all over the world,” he continued. “I get out of the room, I walk through the Oval into the study, and the president’s got a 60-inch flat screen in his study. He’s got the DirectTV D.V.R. control in his hand, he’s going back and forth looking at the thing. He looks over at me, he looks over at the naval aide, and he turns to the naval aide and he says, ‘Tell Anthony what you just told me.’ The naval aide looks to me and he says, ‘Sir, I just told the president that I’ve never seen anybody give a press conference like that and that this guy is going to really help you, sir. He’s got the goods. He’s going to really help.’ So I shook his hand. I said, ‘That’s awesome.’ I said, ‘Mr. President, I hope I can do the job, but you’ve got to know knives are out for me. Those two guys are shitting in their pants.’ He said, ‘Yeah, let them shit in their pants. Don’t worry about it. You’ll be fine, you’ll be fine.’”
Scaramucci thought his first press conference went well. “I’m Italian,” he said. “I like using the word ‘love’”—he used it six times about Trump in that first press conference—“people got upset about that, right? I’m a grown man. I love the president. I say the words. I love everybody. You know what I mean? What do you want me to do? That’s my personality. O.K. I’m aware of my flaws. I write about them pretty honestly in these books I’ve written, right?”
On Wednesday night, July 26, Ryan Lizza, then the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, tweeted that Scaramucci was having dinner at the White House with Trump, the First Lady, Sean Hannity, and Bill Shine, a former Fox News executive. When the Mooch saw Lizza’s tweet, he was pissed because that meant to him that the White House leaks were still occurring. He called Lizza at home to ask who had leaked to him. It was a friendly enough call, the Mooch thought, but it would soon be his undoing. “So now Ryan Lizza,” he said. “His father, Frank, and my father go back 50 years, 51 now, 1967. They know each other from the Long Island construction world. I meet Ryan Lizza on a sound stage at CNN, ‘Hey, are you related to Frank Lizza?’ ‘Frank’s my father.’ ‘Terrific. You grew up on Oyster Bay? Great.’ Long Island Italian, Long Island Italian, fathers know each other for 50 years. My dad says they’re a terrific family. O.K., great. There’s my mistake right there. So if Ryan Lizza says, ‘Oh, I really didn’t know Anthony,’ that is true. I cede that point to him. But if he says he wasn’t trying to build a relationship with me and he wasn’t trying to make me into one of his sources, now he’s lying.” (In an e-mail, Lizza said he’d “never heard” of Scaramucci or his father “until I met him at CNN one night last year.”) “So now I call him because he’s got this story from my boy Reince,” Scaramucci continued. “I’m teasing [Ryan]. You can listen to the tape, ‘Hey, man. O.K., O.K. Who told you that? Break it down. Tell me who told you that.’ ‘Oh, Anthony, ha-ha. I’ve got to protect my sources.’ ‘I know. I’m just breaking your balls. But I don’t understand. The leaking has really got to stop here. We’ve got to figure out a way to stop the leaking. I’m sure Priebus told you that.’ ‘What do you think of Priebus?’ ‘He’s a paranoid schizophrenic.’ Of course I used the f-bomb a few times. I’m prone to do that . . . And I’m making some jokes and I’m playing for laughs, because that’s my personality.
“Do I think I’m being recorded?” he continued. “I do not. That’s my mistake. Do I think the conversation was off the record? A hundred percent I do. Do I say that it’s off the record? I don’t, but I feel that I have a personal rapport with a human being, and inside the spirit of human relations, journalists and their sources know what’s on and off the record . . . In a later call I said, ‘Listen, call David Remnick [the editor of The New Yorker] and yourself, and let’s have an agreement here that you’re not gonna publish this story. I’ll get you 10 other stories. We’ll work on a deal. I’ll fly you around on Air Force One. This is unfair to me. It’s completely and totally off the record.’”
But Lizza wouldn’t go for that deal. “No,” he told Scaramucci. “Me and David have already talked. I’m just giving you the heads-up that we’re publishing this story.” (Lizza said in his e-mail to me that in his audio recording of this second conversation with Scaramucci, there are no offers of “10 other stories” or “rides on Air Force One.” He added, “I’m afraid that as with so much that comes out of his mouth, this is another lie.”)
At first, according to Scaramucci, Trump liked what he had said to Lizza. He got off on all that macho bravado. He liked that there was both the Harvard Law School Scaramucci and the Long Island Mooch. And he told Scaramucci so. He was laughing about it. Scaramucci blamed Steve Bannon for blowing the embers into a conflagration by calling Mark Meadows of the Freedom Caucus. “He’s like, ‘You guys are evangelicals. You don’t like profanity,’ and he’s trying to stir these guys up. They still think he’s big and powerful. He’s asking them to call the president and rail on me for using the profanity. And they do that. So now my support is weakening, but I’m still fine with the president.” (Meadows did not respond to a request for comment; a source close to Bannon maintains he never made such a call.)
On July 28, Priebus was pushed out of his job at the White House. John Kelly replaced him as Trump’s chief of staff. “Nine minutes later, the New York Post is out with a story that my wife is divorcing me because she hates Trump,” Scaramucci said. He continued, “Literally, without exaggeration, it’s 10 minutes later.” (Actually, it was 28 minutes later, and—good news—the Mooch and his wife are back together as a couple now.)
For about the next 48 hours—after Priebus had been fired and until Kelly fired him—there was no doubt inside the Beltway that Scaramucci was a very powerful guy. Spicer and Priebus were gone. He had sandblasted Bannon, and it was clear enough that Bannon’s days were numbered. And Scaramucci still had Trump’s support, despite the profanity-laced Lizza blockbuster. “On that Saturday morning I’m on the phone with the president,” Scaramucci said. “He says, ‘O.K. You’re a lucky bastard. You’re out of the news cycle now because Priebus’s firing is in the news cycle. I’ll see you Monday at eight.’ I say, ‘O.K., great.’”
In the warped time and space of Washington, Scaramucci could tell the arc of political power was starting to bend in his direction. “Just by the way people who were calling me Friday night, Saturday, into Sunday morning,” he said. “People in the West Wing and the way they were calling me, I knew that they were like, ‘Holy shit. Trump means business with Scaramucci, and it looks like Scaramucci means business. He’s one week in the job and he’s blown Priebus into Pennsylvania Avenue. He’s mortally wounded Bannon. Bannon’s not gonna recover from that.’”
But then things began to change rapidly for the Mooch. He started feeling a different kind of Washington wind, a distinctly chilly one. “By late Sunday, I’m getting a feeling that I’m gonna get fired,” he said. “The perception is that I’m powerful, and what I call the swamp-like operatives that are working inside of the White House are now turning towards me and being somewhat obsequious, and if I’m less self-observant, maybe I would buy into that, but I’m not. I’m very self-observant. I say, ‘O.K. These sons of bitches that were ignoring me six months ago are now, Holy fuck. Power’s coming to this guy. I better start being nice to this guy.’ You know what I mean?”
But that began to change on Sunday afternoon. “My bones are telling me I’m gonna get fired because I e-mail a few people,” he said. “The obsequiousness starts at six P.M. on Friday and it ends at about one, two in the afternoon on Sunday. So now I’m like, ‘O.K.’ I just could feel it, less interaction on text, less e-mail interaction, less phone interaction. Now I’m feeling, ‘O.K., if I can survive Monday morning, I‘m gonna go dark. Mission accomplished on Priebus, got to get to Bannon. I’m gonna go dark and not do any press, any interviews, or any of that other stuff.’ And I’m getting hit by the guys inside [that] I’m addicted to the press and all this other stuff.”
Even though, according to Scaramucci, Kelly did not officially fire him until 9:37 A.M. Monday morning, he said he knew by 7:14 A.M. that he had been fired. “How do I know at 7:14 on Monday that I’m getting fired?” he said. “Nick Ayers, who is now the new chief of staff for Vice President Pence, is trying to reach me on the White House bat phone. I had been issued an encrypted phone. When you’re talking to the president or the vice president or people inside the West Wing, you do not use your personal cell phone. You’re issued a White House-encrypted cell phone. O.K., no problem. I’ve got the White House-encrypted cell phone. Nick Ayers is texting me on my regular phone, saying, in effect, ‘Hey, Mooch, why aren’t you answering the White House-encrypted bat phone?’ ‘O.K., let me turn it on.’ I turn it on. It’s inoperable. There’s no e-mail and there’s no cell service. They’ve disconnected my phone. Now I know I’m getting fired, but I’m just waiting for it. You know what I mean?” (Ayers did not respond to a request for comment.)
He was sitting in his small White House office when he got invited to Kelly’s swearing-in as the new chief of staff. “They swear in the chief of staff,” he said. “They’re sitting in those two chairs, the president and Kelly. They’re doing photos. Then the Cabinet meeting starts. I’m getting ready for the Cabinet meeting. I go back to my desk. Kelly’s assistant comes in, ‘Chief of Staff Kelly would like to see you.’ I walk in. I was thinking that I’m not gonna go to the Cabinet meeting, because if I’m fired and it’s still Priebus’s White House—and this was the irony of the day, the thing does not leak. But if it’s Priebus’s White House, every journalist now knows that I’ve been fired. But it’s not Priebus’s White House anymore. It is actually John Kelly’s White House. And guess what? The thing doesn’t leak. Kelly’s first act is he calls me into his office and says, ‘I need to let you go.’”
“Wow,” the Mooch told him. “That’s super disappointing.”
“You know you made a huge mistake last week and these words that you used, which they recorded and got you on tape, you’ll never recover from that,” Kelly replied. “I know this town. I’ve lived in this town a long time, and you’ll never recover from it.”
Scaramucci wasn’t so sure. “I think this town is a lot different today,” he said. “The president recovered from remarks. I know I’m not the president, but if you give me a chance, I’ve put a whole comms plan together,” showing Kelly the document he had in his hand.
“I’m really sorry,” Kelly told him. “I have the full authority of the president. I’m sure you’re gonna want to go in and see him, but you need to know that you don’t need to do that. Him and I spoke about this, and this is our mutual decision.”
“No, I wouldn’t do that to you, sir,” the Mooch replied. “You’re the chief of staff. If you don’t want me here, no sense in me being here. I’m not gonna go around you to the president.”
A White House personnel guy then showed up. “He’s like, ‘Thank you so much for helping us here. Priebus was a disaster.’ I said, ‘No problem.’ He says, ‘If you’re O.K. with it, I have to escort you out.’ I said, ‘Absolutely. No problem. If you don’t mind, because I’m so high-profile at this point, I’d like to go out the East Wing exit, over by Treasury. Are you cool with that?’”
“Yeah, no problem,” he said. “That’s fine, Mooch, no problem.”
The Mooch told me that while it was “very painful” going through it, after six months “on the other side of it,” he thinks it was “an unbelievably phenomenal experience.” He continued, “You want to talk about the education of Anthony Scaramucci? I learned that the swamp is probably a gold-plated cesspool with no drain. You understand what I’m saying? You can’t drain the fucking thing. It’s a gold-plated cesspool, and you got cesspool operators in there that know how to slow down disruptors like Donald Trump.” (He cited as but one example the fact that the sale of SkyBridge to HNA and RON has still not been approved by the federal government.)
He said that one Trump tweet more than any other sums up the man: “My button is bigger than your button.” He said, “If you really know the guy and you know how he’s raking it over everybody and breaking everybody’s balls, it’s like laugh-out-loud funny.”
The Mooch’s tumultuous days did not alter his perception of Donald Trump. “My point is this guy’s a winner,” he said, warming to his subject. “He’s been winning his whole life, and he’s not a choke artist. He’ll hit the shot.” Then he was fully taken with his reverie. “The shot’s going in,” he continued. “Michael Jordan, that last shot in the championship, he wanted the ball. That’s Trump.” Somewhere, an orange-hued president is nodding enthusiastically.
